by Anthology
“ ‘Now we go on. We cannot end, as he did. It is automatic with us.’
“I felt it then, somehow. The blind, purposeless continuance of the machine cities I could understand. They had no intelligence, only functions. These machines—these living, thinking, reasoning investigators—had only one function, too. Their function was slightly different—they were designed to be eternally curious, eternally investigating. And their striving was the more purposeless of the two, for theirs could reach no end. The cities fought eternally only the blind destructiveness of nature; wear, decay, erosion.
“But their struggle had an opponent forever, so long as they existed. The intelligent—no, not quite intelligent, but something else—curious machines were without opponents. They had to be curious. They had to go on investigating. And they had been going on in just this way for such incomprehensible ages that there was no longer anything to be curious about. Whoever, whatever designed them gave them function and forgot purpose. Their only curiosity was the wonder if there might, somewhere, be one more thing to learn.
“That—and the problem they did not want to solve, but must try to solve, because of the blind functioning of their very structure.
“Those eternal cities were limited. The machines saw now that limit, and saw the hope of final surcease in it. They worked on the energy of the atom. But the masses of the suns were yet tremendous. They were dead for want of energy. The masses of the planets were still enormous. But they, too, were dead for want of energy.
“The machines there on Neptune gave me food and drink—strange, synthetic foods and drinks. There had been none on all the planet. They, perforce, started a machine, unused in a billion years and more, that I might eat. Perhaps they were glad to do so. It brought the end appreciably nearer, that vast consumption of mine.
“They used so very, very little, for they were so perfectly efficient. The only possible fuel in all the universe is one—hydrogen. From hydrogen, the lightest of elements, the heaviest can be built up, and energy released. They knew how to destroy matter utterly to energy, and could do it.
“But while the energy release of hydrogen compounding to the heavy elements is controllable, the destruction of matter to energy is a self-regenerative process. Started once, it spreads while matter lies within its direct, contiguous reach. It is wild, uncontrollable. It is impossible to utilize the full energy of matter.
“The suns had found that. They had burned their hydrogen until it was a remnant so small the action could not go on.
“On all Earth there was not an atom of hydrogen—nor was there on any planet, save Neptune. And there the store was not great. I used an appreciable fraction while I was there. That is their last hope. They can see the end, now.
“I stayed those few days, and the machines came and went. Always investigating, always curious. But there is in all that universe nothing to investigate save the one problem they are sure they cannot solve.
“The machine took me back to Earth, set up something near me that glowed with a peculiar, steady, gray light. It would fix the magnetic axis on me, on my location, within a few hours. He could not stay near when the axis touched again. He went back to Neptune, but a few millions of miles distant, in this shrunken mummy of the solar system.
“I stood alone on the roof of the city, in the frozen garden with its deceptive look of life.
“And I thought of that night I had spent, sitting up with the dead man. I had come and watched him die. And I sat up with him in the quiet. I had wanted someone, anyone to talk to.
“I did then. Overpoweringly it came to me I was sitting up in the night of the universe, in the night and quiet of the universe, with a dead planet’s body, with the dead, ashen hopes of countless, nameless generations of men and women. The universe was dead, and I sat up alone—alone in the dead hush.
“Out beyond, a last flicker of life was dying on the planet Neptune—a last, false flicker of aimless life, but not life. Life was dead. The world was dead.
“I knew there would never be another sound here. For all the little remainder of time. For this was the dark and the night of time and the universe. It was inevitable, the inevitable end that had been simply more distant in my day—in the long, long-gone time when the stars were mighty lighthouses of a mighty space, not the dying, flickering candles at the head of a dead planet.
“It had been inevitable then; the candles must burn out for all their brave show. But now I could see them guttering low, the last, fruitless dregs of energy expiring as the machines below had spent their last dregs of energy in that hopeless, utterly faithful gesture—to attempt the repair of the city already dead.
“The universe had been dead a billion years. It had been. This, I saw, was the last radiation of the heat of life from an already-dead body—the feel of life and warmth, imitation of life by a corpse. Those suns had long and long since ceased to generate energy. They were dead, and their corpses were giving off the last, lingering life heat before they cooled.
“I ran. I think I ran—down away from the flickering, red suns in the sky. Down to the shrouding blackness of the dead city below, where neither light, nor heat, nor life, nor imitation of life bothered me.
“The utter blackness quieted me somewhat. So I turned off my oxygen valves, because I wanted to die sane, even here, and I knew I’d never come back.
“The impossible happened! I came to with that raw oxygen in my face. I don’t know how I came—only that here is warmth and life.
“Somewhere, on the far side of that bismuth coil, inevitable still, is the dead planet and the flickering, guttering candles that light the death watch I must keep at the end of time.”
NO MAN’S LAND
Allister Timms
I crouch, hands clasped over my head. A whizbang explodes behind our stretch of trench fittingly named by the soldiers the Bish o’ Prick. The shell showers earth and shrapnel high into the air. This one looks to me like a dark etching Dürer might have engraved of an enormous tree uprooted by a twister.
But I’m blessed with such flights of fancy. Lieutenant Pritchard says that if I daydream anymore I might presage my own death. But he’s an Oxford man and tends to talk like that.
My feet are cold. There is about a foot of water and mud covering the duckboards. Rain is falling in steady streams. Even the elements, it seems, can’t help but imitate the war. If there is a sun, I don’t know it. And when I do catch a glimpse, it’s murky. Like it’s been doused in coal tar.
I’m getting a little rest and time to think. Part of my company was out all night in No-Man’s-Land, gathering information on the strength and number of machine guns Fritz has in place. The appearance of a sagging moon made our task harder and cost the life of Private Richards. I had joked with Corporal Jennings that the moon sagged on account of all the heat from the mortars both sides had flung at each another. He had laughed. And then he wept when Richards got it in the head. Richards was only eighteen. A buckshee private from Llandudno. Jennings closed his eyes. Another flare went up, burst, and cascaded down in a drizzle of dying lights. We scrambled out of the crater, leaving Richards behind in the waterlogged hole.
I try to sleep in my billet until the stand to order comes down the line. I listen to our artillery pound away at the fortified German positions and they in turn pound us. It’s like a game of tennis that titans might play.
I look at my watch. It’s July 30. Time’s against me and I know it. Another day and the Battle of Passchendaele will be in full offensive and 300,000 men will die. It’s recorded in all the history books. And now I could be one of them. The battalion has been given its orders. As an officer, I’m privy to what the other men only sense and fear. Who would have known that the uniform I purchased over the Internet would have turned out to be an officer’s uniform. And a lieutenant’s at that.
No wonder I can’t sleep. Not after what’s happened. Like the comforting words a madman repeats to himself to prove that he’s sane, I remove the flat, i
Phone-like Speed of Light device that Timeshares provided for this journey and type in the numbers. Over and over I punch them in. Turning numbers into a prayer.
Nothing. Like it’s been for a month. Nothing but the image of an hourglass and sifting sand. I want to toss the device over the trench and watch as a German sniper blasts to smithereens my only connection to my existence in the twenty-first century. But I can’t bring myself to do it.
It was something the boy said. “Sir, Private Hawkes is dead.”
Five little words. That’s all it took.
They’d screwed up. Timeshares had blundered. I gave the tech the exact year of 1917 and the exact location of Passchendaele. And, most importantly, the precise date: July 28. That was the last diary entry of Toby Hawkes, my great-grandfather.
I should have guessed from the layers of white-gold bling-bling the young tech wore around his neck and the lazy chew of his slack jaw that I should have rescheduled.
“You’ve got that time figured precisely, right?” I’d asked. I know it sounds paranoid, but time traveling, even for recreational purposes, isn’t anything to treat lightly. One wrong digit, and I could have ended up in 1717 in a field of grazing cows.
“I could do this with my eyes closed,” the tech replied, stabbing the keypad of the slim electronic device with Passchendaele’s degrees of longitude and latitude.
“It’s just I scheduled my appointment with Dr. Arundel, that’s all,” I remarked.
“No worries. The doc is out with the flu. He just gives the briefing. It’s me who flicks the switch.”
Flicks the switch. This secular description of a complex and highly specialized field of molecular transference and time travel should have clued me in. But I shrugged and stepped inside the tubular contraption that looked like a frosted shower stall.
Thank God I’d been shrewd enough to ask about the briefing.
“Okay, the briefing,” grinned the tech. “You’ll need this.” He shoved the small electronic device he’d been holding into my hand. “That gizmo is your ticket home, so don’t lose it. What you do is . . .” and he perfunctorily explained about the numbers to dial that would connect me to Timeshares and scramble my atoms to bring me back to the current time. “Any questions?”
I looked at the Speed of Light device in my hand and watched the emblem of Timeshares, an ancient hourglass with sifting gold sand, blink across the screen. I secured the device in my trench coat.
The tech fastened the door on the Time Sequencing Modulator. I clutched my army haversack stuffed with gear: my great-grandfather’s diary, gas mask, helmet, shovel, dried rations, candles, water canister, extra pair of puttees, eating tin, packs of Woodbines, laces, three pairs of extra socks (I wasn’t taking any chances here), ammunition pouch, and an officer-issued revolver. It had taken me a good two weeks to locate all this paraphernalia, except for the diary, on eBay. I hadn’t realized Timeshares would have provided a costume for me, included with the price of my “vacation.”
I clenched my fists as the Time Sequencing Modulator screened my genetic makeup with a soothing blue pattern of lights. The small space began to heat up. Comfortable at first, like a hot tub, but then it got hotter. I pulled at my stiff collar. Fidgeted as the temperature rose.
I grabbed at my great-grandfather’s diary to calm myself. I recited over and over his last entry: “Hobbs and I have come to blows over the money again. I knew he’d turn out to be a power-hungry bastard. I had me bleedin doubts about him right off. Should have followed me gut and never taken him under me wings. I swear to bloody god, he’s going to kill me. So I’m writing this down in case I don’t make it home to dear Old Blighty.”
A blinding white light suddenly enveloped the inside of the modulator and I felt like a Rubik’s Cube of flesh, twisting and turning, turning and twisting. And then I felt nothing but a lingering taste of cottonmouth, like I’d eaten rhubarb for an eternity.
It’s unwise to travel the trenches by day. The enemy’s snipers are always looking for new targets. And they are good. Better marksmen than our boys. Pritchard tells me it’s on account of their grand Teutonic past that favored arms to art. I respond it was probably because they drank less rum and got better training.
I pass NCOs issuing the day’s orders. Soldiers filling sandbags. Others dumping creosol and chloride of lime. Still more men pumping the brackish water out of the trench while singing hymns. The British Tommy loves to sing, even when he is about to die. Maybe he knows it could happen anytime. Perhaps it’s his way of preparing his immortal soul even as he pumps putrid water.
I walk by a couple of big brown rats. Hefty buggers who, despite their bulk, are ever so nimble on the parapet. The one at the end of this little expeditionary force stops and inspects me. I try to remember a refrain or a bar from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. I think even though he’s a rat, he would have made a lovely king of mice commanding his soldiers. But he doesn’t stay long enough for me to remember a note. So I schlep on, keeping my head down.
I find William Blake in his “coffin.” It’s his morose way of describing his pillbox crafted out of sandbags.
And, yes, it’s that Blake. The eighteenth-century painter, engraver, visionary poet, and patriarch of English Romanticism. Turns out Timeshares isn’t restricted to my own century. They’ve been busy capitalizing on Faulkner’s famous dictum that “the past is not dead. It’s not even past,” and adding their own consumer slant with, “And now it can be anything you want it to be!”
Blake wears a frown as he says, “War on Earth is energy enslav’d.”
I slump down on an overturned barrel and stare. Even after a month, I still find it hard to reason—which Blake keeps telling me is man’s greatest folly—that I’m sharing the trenches of World War I with the eccentric poet who was considered mad during his lifetime and a genius in modern times.
I have the itch to ask him if it’s true that he and Mrs. Blake recited Milton in the nude in their garden in South Molton. But I just can’t bring myself to do it.
I tap the last Woodbine from the package, pack it on the butt of my revolver, and toss it into my mouth. I only cough a couple of times now when I take a long drag. It was a lot harder in the beginning. I felt like I was coughing my lungs up, and there is mustard gas for that.
A rowdy bout of mortars rain down.
“So, what shall we discuss today?” asks Blake.
He asks me this every time. And I answer it with the same reply: “Timeshares.”
It’s what binds us together and sets us apart from the other soldiers. But with this broken homing device, God knows I’m stuck here now just like the rest of the infantrymen. And I shouldn’t be. It’s a fucking mistake. The soldiers, they know they might die here in France. I was one hundred percent certain I couldn’t. So my fate now seems more sealed than the men around me. They’ve got hope, whereas I don’t even have that. Even if I do survive the coming battle, this time isn’t mine. I don’t have a family to go home to. Shit, I’m not even born for another ninety-five years!
Blake knew I was relieved when I found him. And I might have just passed him by like I did so many of the other men. I only stopped because he was vandalizing military equipment.
I stepped closer for a better look. I had to cough to get his attention.
Right away I sensed something different about him. He looked me square in the eyes with sad, innocent ones, like the eyes of a seer. They were so at odds with his fierce-jowled face.
If he hadn’t met my gaze, I wouldn’t have looked down.
That’s when I noticed what he had been engraving into the butt of his rifle. It was an hourglass.
I splurted out, “What . . . what do you know about that?”
“Nothing sir,” he replied surly.
“You tell me right now what you know about that hourglass, or I’ll have you digging a latrine while the flares go up.”
He shook his large head. “Infernal intellectuals. I wonder if that’s why I’m
such a good shot?”
“I’m warning you, soldier.”
Enigmatically he said, “Time can as easily flow forward as it can back.” (If I had known who he was then, I’d have thought it was simply one of his proverbs.)
“Timeshares,” I whispered, as if to a lover.
“Yes,” he replied. “The Eternals, it seems, have brought us together.”
Machine gun fire rattles over No-Man’s-Land. It sounds like rain falling on leaves.
Blake hunches down in his coffin. He’s drawing a bead on some unfortunate. I always try to see him pull the trigger. But it happens like some prestige. The only evidence of his kill is the empty cartridge floating in the muck at his feet.
I ask him again to tell me about Timeshares in his world. “It’s not an order,” I say. “It’s a favor, of one friend to another.”
Blake slides the bolt back on his rifle. “Timeshares is a dowdy little hovel on Carnaby Street. I like to wander all over London, exploring, thinking—it’s when I get my best visions. I was curious about the sign of the hourglass hanging outside the shop. Time has always intrigued me: each end of an hourglass seems to me like twin aspects of eternity. So I stepped into the unassuming shop and came out here.”
“But why did you?”
Blake frowns and it produces a faint smile on his lips. He stuffs a hand into his mud-splattered trench coat and pulls out a handful of dark little seeds like minuscule shots. “Poppy seeds,” he tells me, shaking them in his closed fist. “Wherever the angel tells me there will be a great war in the future, Timeshares sends me to that place, and it’s where I sow the seeds of poetry. I came here to leave a gift; to remind man that war threatens creativity, destroys the breath of the Almighty. Man’s wars are nothing but the fever of the human soul. I even went back to antiquity, to Homer’s day, hoping to discourage him from writing his war epic. But the fool thought me an upstart poet trying to steal his muse.”
A shower of flares explodes over our heads. They fall to earth like wounded angels.